But in the criticism of his poetical history this is in strictness irrelevant. It is unlucky for that criticism that Southey and Ticknor--the two best critics, not merely in English but in any language, who have dealt with Spanish literature--were quite unacquainted with the French _chansons de geste_; while of late, discussion of the _Poema_, as of other early Spanish literature, has been chiefly abandoned to philologists. No one familiar with these _chansons_ (the greatest and oldest of which, the _Chanson de Roland_, was to all but a certainty in existence when Ruy Diaz was in his cradle, and a hundred years before the _Poema_ was written) can fail to see in a moment that this latter is itself a _chanson de geste_. It was written much nearer to the facts than any one of its French analogues, except those of the Crusading cycle, and it therefore had at least the chance of sticking much closer to those facts. Nor is there much doubt that it does. We may give up as many as we please of its details; we may even, if, not pleasing, we choose to obey the historians, give up that famous and delightful episode of the Counts of Carrion, which indeed is not so much an episode as the main subject of the greater part of the poem. But--partly because of its nearness to the subject, partly because of the more intense national belief in the hero, most of all, perhaps, because the countrymen of Cervantes already possessed that faculty of individual, not merely of typical, characterisation which has been, as a rule, denied to the countrymen of Corneille--the poem is far more _alive_ than the not less heroic histories of Roncesvaux or of Aliscans. Even in the _Nibelungenlied_, to which it has been so often compared, the men (not the women--there the Teutonic genius bears its usual bell) are, with the exception, perhaps, of Hagen, shadowy, compared not merely to Rodrigo himself, but to Bermuez and Muno Gustioz, to Asur Gonzalez and Minaya. [Sidenote: _In scheme and spirit._] Still the _chanson_ stamp is unmistakably on it from the very beginning, where the Cid, like three-fourths of the _chanson_ heroes themselves, has experienced royal ingratitude, through the vaunts and the fighting, and the stock phrases (_abaxan las lanzas_ following _abrazan los escudos_, and the like), to that second marriage connecting the Cid afresh with royalty, which is almost as common in the _chansons_ as the initial ingratitude. It would be altogether astonishing if the _chansons_ had not made their way, when French literature was making it everywhere, into the country nearest to France. In face of the _Poema del Cid_, it is quite certain that they had done so, and that here as elsewhere French literature performed its vigorous, and in a way self-sacrificing, function of teaching other nations to do better than their teacher. [Sidenote: _Difficulties of its prosody._]